One of the important parts of your Nico Nico life, especially if you're into utaite/Vocaloid producers, is joining communities. If you like listening to namahousou (live broadcasts), you need to join the communities of the people you listen to because sometimes, they lock their namahousou. There are also some people who lock some of their uploads to their communities, so you have to join to view them.

The most basic thing to do here is to go to the person's community page and click the join button:

After clicking it, you will get a "do you really want to join this comm?" message and you just have to click the black button to continue. There are times, like in ASK's comm, that you have to type a small message before joining (these are moderated communities). You have to type in Japanese your reasons for joining and you'll be approved within a week.

There are more to communities than just for listening to namahousou, though. This is a very basic guide to what you can see in a community page.

When you go to the community homepage : com.nicovideo.jp, you'll see something like this.

The communities with most recent activities are listed on the left part while interest tags are listed on the right. You can search communities you might like by tags or you can use the search bar. If you access the menu at the top beside your name, and click the community (コミュニティー) link, you'll be given a list of communities you've joined.

Each community has a title, blurb and some stats on them. A closer look will be like this:

The three stats with numbers at the bottom left corresponds to community level, number of members, and number of uploads recorded in the community, respectively. The community level determines the priviliges the community owner/members can do. The higher the community level, the more things they can do during namahousou. Some levels and their priviliges are:

Level 20/54/80/115 - the ability to give out backstage passes (2, 5, 10, 20 people respectively)Level 25 - the ability to do a survey (anquette) during the namahousouLevel 40/50 - free points which can be used to pay for skipping queueing for namahousou slotsLevel 46/69/90 - free points which can be used to pay for booking namahousouLevel 57/74/86 - free points for extending namahousou (for more than 30 minutes)Level 66/105 - additional seats for your namahousou (+500 and +1000 seats respectively), this means you can accommodate more viewers and people will have less chances of getting kicked out.

The two squares at the right side of the box are your access details. The first square, the one with the head, refers to your ability to hold a namahousou in that community. The second square, the one with PASS written on it, refers to your ability to have a backstage pass. A backstage pass allows someone to enter the namahousou even if it's full and to have his/her comments appear in special boxes with his/her name, instead of the usual scrolling comments. When these boxes are lit GREEN, it means you have these privileges. If they are grey, it means you do not have these privileges.

A community homepage has a lot of things on it, not only namahousou schedules or uploads. You can look at the different parts of a community page here.

It is very important to read the recent notices and announcements every now and then because this part contains the recent projects, issues and statements of the owner or personality. Guidelines to be followed upon joining the comm is also written here (for example, in the Asamakku community). If you cannot understand Japanese and cannot read the notices, even slight understanding of it using excite.jp or google translate will do, as long as you know that you aren't stepping on any toes or breaking any comm rules.

For paid users, visiting the community is also important because this is where you can watch timeshifts of previous namahousou even if you didn't reserve them beforehand (as long as it has timeshift enabled). When you view the previous namahousou list, you'll see something like this:

A namahousou with a yellow clock icon has timeshift you can view while one without an icon is gone forever. Paid users can watch the timeshift of a namahousou until 7 days since it was broadcasted.

Free users can join up to 50 communities, while premium users can join up to 200 communities. You also cannot have your own community or hold your own namahousou if you do not have a premium account.